Today is the last day of Paul Maritz's job as CEO of VMware. Some have speculated that Paul's move to EMC corporate was a demotion. When I hear this, I immediately tell people no way was Paul demoted. I was lucky to work at Microsoft at the time when Paul was considered the #3 man, behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Yes, the CEO of VMware was the #3 man at Microsoft, and if still there would be the #2 man or #1 if Steve Ballmer left. But, that would assume Paul survived the political changes at Microsoft.

Paul will be back home in Pacific Northwest. Paul would fly on the Alaska Air flight regularly from Seattle to SJC, and then fly home. I've seen him on the flight and many other VMware employees. Now, Paul can go back to having Seattle as his base, taking the Seattle to Boston flight to EMC, but at least not every week to EMC HQ.

Filling Maritz's shoes will be no easy task. Maritz has long been a luminary of the industry. He was president and general manager of EMC's Cloud Computing Division before his appointment as CEO of VMware in 2008. Prior to that, he spent 14 years at Microsoft and was widely regarded as the third-ranking executive at the software behemoth, behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He was in charge of Microsoft's desktop and server software, overseeing the development of Windows 95, Windows NT and Internet Explorer.

During his four years as CEO of VMware, Maritz helped dramatically increase the company's fortunes. When he took charge in 2008, about 25 percent of the world's Intel-based applications were running on a virtualized base. Four years later, that figure is 60 percent. In that same period, the number of VMware certified professionals has risen from 25,000 to 125,000.

"Back in 2008, we were asking ourselves what the hell is it," Maritz said of cloud computing. "Now we're asking ourselves: What do we do about it? How do we actually implement it? How do you transform your operations to take full advantage of it? What's going to happen in four years' time? Where are we going with this technology?"